While conservatives and libertarians twiddle their thumbs considering what to do about the Left’s hijacking of our once-esteemed institutions of higher education, leftists are already putting the next steps of their plan into motion. Leftist administrators and academics, along with their modern-day disciples, are now seeking to bring their program of indoctrination to K-12 education in California. The new Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum adopted by the California State Board of Education, created under a mandate from California Assembly Bill 2016, does just that.

As defined by the model curriculum, ethnic studies “is the interdisciplinary study of race, ethnicity, and indigeneity with an emphasis on experiences of people of color in the United States. Further, it is the xdisciplinary [sic], loving, and critical praxis of holistic humanity — as educational and racial justice.” But anyone looking for a clear explanation beyond this definition will be hard-pressed to find it in the model curriculum, as it goes on to say that the field of study is “xdisciplinary [sic], in that it variously takes the forms of being interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary, undisciplinary, and intradisciplinary. As such, it can grow its original language to serve these needs with purposeful respellings of terms, including history as herstory and women as womxn, connecting with a gender and sexuality lens, along with a socioeconomic class lens at three of its intersections.”The moralizing language of the radical Left may promise to “cultivate empathy,” incubate inclusivity, and create a “space to share ... stories of struggle and resistance” for the “holistic well-being of all participants,” but it is merely a thin veil to cover leftists’ attempts to politicize education and write a revisionist history of the United States of America. Don’t take my word for it: The manifesto, masquerading as curriculum, encourages a pedagogy that praises Angela Davis, Frantz Fanon, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and notorious cop-killer Assata Shakur alike.These leftist academics are so high up in their ivory tower that they can’t seem to reckon with the fact that parents are inherently skeptical of idolatry of perverse anti-Americanism. Davis aided and abetted criminals before her stint as a Communist Party USA vice presidential candidate. Fanon was a violent revolutionary whose works inspired Eldridge Cleaver, an early leader of the Black Panther Party who hailed his own acts of rape as political tools in his memoir “Soul on Ice.” Mumia Abu-Jamal and Assata Shakur are both convicted cop-killers.Yet, these leftists are too busy casting militant extremists in a more flattering light to seriously consider critics that argue capitalism isn’t a “form of power and oppression.” Instead, in bad faith, they write them off as captives of a colonial mindset that foments fear, racism, and bigotry — and lump in their critiques with “threats made by those with white supremacist beliefs.”For the radical Left, this is not a new phenomenon. The campus Left has long conflated probing ideas with provocation, discourse with disrespect, and speech with violence to strengthen its chokehold over campus culture. Allow this infection to fester for a few decades, and one gets the present crisis plaguing the American college campus. Inflamed by this diseased culture, students are incited to violence over speech they deem hateful: Administrators impose leftist orthodoxy from the top down and hecklers force heterodox thinkers into being in lockstep with the most progressive whims of the Left.Over the course of my first three years at UC-Berkeley, I’ve been a target of violent Antifa riots and witnessed my friends’ privacy violated, property destroyed, and faces punched. We even successfully sued UC-Berkeley for infringing on our First and Fourteenth Amendment constitutional rights. Needless to say, I’ve become all too familiar with the toxic philosophy and perverse logic that has not only made the campus prone to this type of behavior — but encourages and vindicates it. My university has also come accustomed to the costs associated with bending to the capricious demands of the radical Left — even up to the tune of $600,000. The fallout from the campus Left’s lawlessness has forced UC-Berkeley to recommit themselves to free speech and rational discourse in an attempt to salvage its reputation.If the goal is to have California’s K-12 education system mirror the brokenness I’ve observed at UC-Berkeley, then implementing an educational model that replaces venerated intellectuals with violent ideologues is certainly the way to go about it. It’s up to educators and families to heed history’s warning and prevent the far Left from further making a mockery of some of our brightest young minds.